Hobday said in a murmur to the ’planesmen, ‘Get her up again now.’ With the motors driving her ahead again, they’d be able to. The motors’ hum was audible again: that, and men’s small movements, quiet voices, and the steady ticking of the log. ERA Knight’s voice in a whisper to someone near him, ‘I’m right ’andy with a fryin’-pan, you’d be surprised, mate.’ Nick lay still with his eyes on the sweating, painted steel above him, and tried to visualise what was outside it, the dark enclosing water and taut wires growing in it like graceful stems with the flower-heads of destruction, death, swaying to the tide. He heard Wishart tell the helmsman to steer 090 degrees.
Hobday asked him, ‘Shut watertight doors, sir?’
He’d put the question casually, and for a moment , Nick didn’t think anything about it. Then he caught its import: Hobday was suggesting shutting the compartments off from each other so that mine damage wouldn’t necessarily flood the whole submarine at once.
‘Course oh-nine-oh, sir.’
‘Very good … No, not yet, Number One.’
There must be pros and cons, Nick realised, and Wishart would have turned them over in his mind before he gave that answer. Perhaps communications and morale considerations versus that damage-control advantage. If one could work up a positive interest in the technical aspects of what was happening it might help, he thought. Jake Cameron had been over at the chart table; he came back now and told Nick and Burtenshaw, ‘Chances of actually hitting one are pretty small, you know.’ Nick wondered if Cameron believed it, or if he himself might be whistling in the dark. Agnew, the Boy Telegraphist, had obviously been fast asleep; he’d just come into the compartment blinking, stifling yawns, pale as a ghost. ERA Knight jerked his head towards the telegraphs and Agnew moved quickly to that port after corner. Jake told Burtenshaw, speaking very quietly, ‘That ERA – Knight, his name is – he’s from Newcastle, but his father’s bought up some big London garage, and when the war ends Knight there takes over as the boss.’
He and the ERA had chatted last evening, while he’d been busy on chart corrections and Knight had been doing some job in the control room. Jake told the Marine, ‘I warned him I’d be along for free gas.’
‘Motor of your own, have you?’
‘I wasn’t at Harrow, my lad!’ He didn’t say it as if it mattered to him. He glanced up at Nick, and winked.
Clang…
‘Stop together.’
The order had come quick as lightning, but not with any sense of alarm detectable in its tone. Now, on the port side, there was a noise like sawing. Not as far for’ard as the first lot had been. It was probably because it was closer, Nick told himself, that it sounded so much louder.
‘Starboard twenty.’
Aiming, of course, to swing her to port around the wire, throwing her afterpart clear to prevent the mine-wire fouling the after hydroplane. Agnew reported, looking more surprised than sleepy now, ‘Both motors stopped, sir.’ Nick warned himself that this was only the first field of them, and that in the forty-five miles between this end of the straits and the Marmara there were bound to be plenty more. One might as well settle the mind to it, come to terms with it as an unpleasant interlude that had somehow to be lived through. But how might that be done? Surface actions and, in particular, destroyer actions were fast, brief, noisy and exciting enough to be – by and large – quite enjoyable. Utterly different. The scraping was still moving aft: a harsh, very unpleasant noise. Very close, too. He craned out of his bunk, to get a sight of the nearer of the two depth-gauges: a hundred and twelve feet: a hundred and thirteen … The submarine was not only scraping her side along the cable, she was also sliding down it. He realised that with her screws stopped, without any forward motion through the water, the hydroplanes could have no effect on depth-keeping. But perhaps that didn’t matter much: since the mine would be at the top end of the wire, to slide down in the opposite direction wasn’t such a bad idea. The thought made him smile: he was hardly aware of it, but he’d happened to meet Jake Cameron’s glance and Cameron grinned back at him. Because the scraping noise had stopped? It had … But it might start again at any moment, he told himself, wanting to be ready for it if it did.
He wondered where the wire was now. And where others might be. One had no idea at all how thickly the Turks might have sown this minefield. Heaven knew, one had planted enough of them oneself: in the Channel, in the Dover days, those quick mine-laying sorties to the Belgian coast, always so damn glad when the last mine had slid off the destroyer’s stern so that she was no longer a vulnerable floating bomb … Wishart blew his nose. Then he said calmly, pushing the hand, kerchief back into a pocket of his shabby grey-flannel trousers, ‘Midships. Port ten. Slow ahead starboard.’ He was using the screw that was on the side away from where the wire had been, and starboard rudder to counter the turning effect of using only one motor. Just to get past the infernal — Nick screwed up his eyes for about a second — bloody thing …
‘Slow ahead both. Ship’s head now, Roost?’
‘Oh-five-seven, sir.’ He left the port wheel on, to bring her round to starboard, which was the way they had to go. Agnew had reached up to swing the telegraph handles round. They were well above his head, on that after bulkhead, and it was difficult for him because he was so short. Hobday ordered quietly, ‘Hundred feet, second.’
‘Aye, sir.’ Morton increased the up-angle on his ’planes. He was soaking wet by this time and he had his eyes slitted to keep the sweat from running into them. CPO Crabb glanced sideways at him, and sniffed; he muttered, ‘Gawd …’
‘Steer oh-nine-oh.’
Playing safe, Nick guessed, visualising the picture on the chart and trying to occupy his own mind by reading Wishart’s. Going farther out to starboard as one passed through the entrance into the widening bay wouldn’t make much odds, but getting too far the other way, towards Cape Helles, could spell trouble. Once this kind of zigzagging around started, so that one’s position was uncertain, and on top of that not knowing much about what the tidal stream might be doing at any particular depth, it would be reasonable enough to allow some extra margin of sea-room. Roost reported, ‘Course oh-nine-oh, sir.’ Morton whispered sideways at the coxswain, ‘What d’you let out – rose-water?’ It occurred to Nick that if this was a sample of what might be expected all through the straits, except that there’d be much narrower places and other forms of defences, one could almost say there wasn’t a hope in ten thousand of getting through: he was trying to find a way of arguing against that, when they caught the wire.
The submarine jolted hard: an arresting jerk that sent men staggering, stopped her and listed her sharply to starboard. Men were grabbing at things near them for support: Nick, with one hand hooked over piping on the deckhead and the other clutching the edge of his bunk, heard Wishart order, ‘Stop together!’ Then, as Agnew reached to the brass handles of the telegraphs, the mine-wire sprang off the starboard hydroplane: you could feel the jump of it, the sudden powerful wrench, the quivery spasm of release. Wishart, glancing towards Agnew again and opening his mouth, hadn’t had time to speak when the wire snapped back just as violently against the submarine’s starboard side – here, amidships. Faces, eyes turned that way: it would be the saddle-tank, outside the pressure hull, that the wire had clanged against and where it was now scraping and creaking. She’d angled over to port, and now she swung back to starboard, a list towards the wire as it bent itself around her and exerted some kind of twisting force. Then the mine on the end of the cable crashed into the side of the bridge above their heads.
Echoes dinned through the boat: through men’s eardrums, skulls …
Extraordinarily, there’d been no explosion.
Jake Cameron, finding Everard and Burtenshaw both staring at him, realised he’d been holding his breath. He let it out – slowly, not wanting it to be obvious. The vice which had clamped on his guts a few seconds ago was easing its grip. He crossed to the chart table, picked up a pencil that could do wit
h sharpening and read the code letters on it: HB … Thinking about those two goofing at him like that, the thought of having let them see how badly he’d had the wind up in the last minute or two was about as disturbing as anything that was happening around them.
E.57 rocked back, settled on an even keel. The wire scraped jerkily along the starboard tanks.
‘Port twenty. Slow ahead port.’
Wishart had his handkerchief in his hand, holding it ready as if he was about to sneeze. The urge to do so must have left him; he was pushing it back into his pocket.
‘Twenty o’ port wheel on, sir.’ Roost was calm, expressionless. Agnew reported in a slightly breathless tone, ‘Port – port motor goin’ slow ahead, sir.’
‘You’re doing well, young Agnew.’
The boy grinned self-consciously. Aware of several other friendly glances, he turned slightly pink. No scraping noise, suddenly. They waited, thinking – or carefully not thinking – about the wire and the thing it held moored to the seabed and the protuberance of the starboard after hydroplane, whether the boat would be swinging fast enough to clear it.
Wishart gave it time. Finally he murmured – as if it didn’t matter terribly – ‘Lost it, I do believe.’ Crabb grated, without taking his eyes off the dial in front of him, ‘The ’un mines go bang when you ’it ’em. That must’ve been one of ours.’
Everybody laughed. Wishart said, ‘When we get back, cox’n, I’ll buy you a drink.’ He looked at Hobday. ‘Let’s get down a bit before we hit a live one. Hundred and fifty feet.’
* * *
Hobday had the watch, and Burtenshaw still occupied his bunk. Reading the Tolstoy essays now. Wishart had turned in too; he was flat out and his eyes were shut, but Nick didn’t think he was asleep. Probably only discouraging conversation. Nick was in the armchair, playing a game of patience with a pack of cards that Cameron had offered him. Cameron was on the other side of the table, facing him, writing letters or a letter: he wrote with his head bent low over the pad, so that all Nick saw was the top of his broad, dark head.
He’d found he had no urge to sleep, and that lying horizontal, wide awake, while other men were up and working within sight and earshot, imposed the irritating feeling of being an invalid of some sort. Which of course he had been, not so long ago – and might the difficulty he’d had in accepting that status be the cause of this restlessness?
There could be other, contributory causes. Sarah: not knowing why she’d rushed down to London like that, to spend time with his father – whom, God knew, she had reason enough to loathe. Could it have been anything else but remorse? And might she, through remorse, hate him now?
He was holding a seven of hearts, staring at it as if it had some great significance. He put it down, and brought the game back into focus … But being a passenger was irksome anyway: it had been in Terrapin and it was the same here in the submarine. He told himself, as he put a red queen on a black king, that giving way to the irritation was a weakness: that he should make himself relax and accept the unpalatable truth that ships and operations could be run quite well without his help!
Leveret – this new appointment – was another irritation. All right, so he’d be at sea – when the old tub wasn’t laid up with boiler trouble or other ailments – and it was a command. But in that Mudros flotilla an old Laforey-class destroyer would be the runt of the litter, the ship that got all the dullest jobs … The game hadn’t come out. He began to collect the cards, to start again. He could hear the sporadic scratching noise that Cameron’s pen made as he wrote his love-letter – or whatever it was. Love-letters on the brain, he thought … Through wanting one so badly, and getting only those two matter-of-fact, stepmotherly notes from her. He’d been at Queenstown in Ireland when they’d reached him, working on Admiral Sir Lewis Bayly’s staff at the liaison- and training-base for the new American convoy-escort flotillas. Sarah’s letters had been brief, polite acknowledgements of his own long, impassioned ones. He’d been puzzled; but also he’d been hard-worked up there, and busy in any spare time composing letters and pulling strings in efforts to get back to sea; there’d been little time for worrying or working things out. And now, holding the pack of cards in his clenched left hand, he stared at Jake Cameron’s bowed head and saw Sarah in his mind’s eye: ghostlike, vague and enigmatic, because in the weeks since he’d left home waters and heard nothing more from her she’d become the centre of almost constant speculation and anxiety – as well as—
One baulked at the word. But all right… He fanned the whole pack in his two hands. All right: love.
She’s my stepmother, for God almighty’s sake!
Cameron had raised his head: they were staring at each other across the table.
‘All right?’
‘What?’ Coming to earth … ‘Oh yes, fine, thanks.’ He shrugged. ‘Not very good at just sitting about, though.’
‘You won’t have to, for long, will you.’ Jake blotted a page of his letter and turned it over. ‘Only a few days, then you’ll be having a run ashore in Turkey. All harems and ’Araq, so they say.’
Quiet, and warm. Since her brush with the mines, E.57 had been paddling along in perfect peace for about an hour-and-a-half. Against the background hum of her motors and the noise the log made – all of which disappeared if you didn’t think about it or listen for it – one heard only the small movements of the helmsman and the two ’planesmen, a quiet order occasionally from Hobday, or some sound as the duty ERA shifted his position. Routine – homely … Jake went on with the letter to his mother.
Having had no excitements I really have nothing very interesting to say. The climate of course is wonderful although we have had some colder days and the nights are beginning to feel quite chilly. Mind you, by English standards you’d still think it was quite summery!
All she wanted was a few pages with her son’s handwriting all over them. And the security – no, she didn’t only want that, she needed it – to know he was alive and likely to remain so.
You needn’t worry for two seconds about me, you know. The War is nearly over and in no time at all I shall be walking up the path and knocking on the door. In fact I have been thinking quite a bit about what I shall do when the time comes to leave the Navy. Apply to the old Line, I suppose; but then there may be rather a lot of chaps like me and not nearly enough berths for us all.
Now why had he written that? To test her reaction?
If he did apply, the Line would surely – he hoped – welcome him back. He’d become one of their cadets at the beginning of 1914; and his father Ewan Cameron had put in a lifetime’s service with them. A tragically foreshortened lifetime; it had ended in the Atlantic two years ago, when the ship of which he’d been Master had been blown almost in half by a U-boat’s torpedo and gone down in seconds. Jake had been allowed a fortnight’s compassionate leave – two weeks in which to comfort an elderly, broken-hearted woman who even at the end of that leave, when Jake had had to return to his submarine flotilla at Blyth, hadn’t learnt to believe in what had happened. The finality had been too much for her to accept as real; her emotional struggles had seemed to Jake rather like those of someone trying to condition their mind to accept the limitlessness of space, and finding the concept too elusive to be held on to. And at the same time, through the bewilderment, reality would strike in intermittently, bringing with it such an infinity of pain that it could only be described as torment. In trying to comfort her in that degree of agony, he’d been able to subdue his own quite powerful sense of loss; and after the fortnight’s leave a submarine patrol in the German Bight had felt like a rest-cure. He’d felt guilty, for enjoying the relief of it.
Even now, although most of the time she seemed to have her feet back on the ground – as much as she ever had, anyway — wasn’t she still half believing the old man would come home one day? Jake was fairly certain of it. The doubt, for him, was whether he should continue in a sea career; whether he shouldn’t find himself some kind of job ashore s
o as to stay close to her.
I hope you are looking after yourself properly and seeing plenty of your friends. I am quite sure it won’t be long before I am home with you, but until then you must try to …
‘Captain, sir.’ Hobday. Wishart opened his eyes and turned his head on the pillow. ‘According to DR, sir, we should be in the middle.’
‘Right.’ Aubrey Wishart swung himself off the bunk, and slid down. Old flannels with frayed turn-ups, and a cricket shirt that must once have been white but was now yellowish with age. Tennis shoes. On patrol, nobody cared about uniform. Hobday, wearing his reefer jacket, was the only one who would have been recognisable to an outsider as a commissioned officer; and the rest of his turn-out was a pair of tweed trousers and a white shirt with no collar. Jake had an open shirt over a string vest; his trousers were blue serge from his cadet days.
He’d put the writing-pad away and crossed over to the chart table. Wishart joined him there.
By dead reckoning – DR, meaning an unchecked position estimated only from the courses steered and distances on each course by log – the submarine would now be five miles inside the straits and just about in the middle of Aren Kioi bay. It was the broadest stretch of water in the whole length of the Dardanelles: pear-shaped, it narrowed up towards the bottleneck. If they were where they thought they should be, there’d be two miles of water on each beam.
Wishart glanced round the control room. Chief ERA Grumman had propped his bulk against the panel of vents and blows, Finn was on the fore ’planes and Anderson on the after ones. Ellery, the signalman, was helmsman.
‘How long since the others got their heads down?’
Hobday looked at the clock. ‘Hour-and-a-half, sir.’
‘Damn it, they’ll be getting bed-sores … Let’s have the cox’n and second cox’n on the ’planes … You happy there, Chief?’
Patrol to the Golden Horn Page 7
